Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German Jewish philosopher and cultural critic. An eclectic thinker, combining elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, and Jewish mysticism, Benjamin made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory, literary criticism, and historical materialism. He was associated with the Frankfurt School, and also maintained formative friendships with thinkers such as playwright Bertolt Brecht and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem. He was also related by law to German political theorist Hannah Arendt through her first marriage...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionCritic
Date of Birth15 July 1892
CountryGermany
Before going back to college, i knew i didn't want to be an intellectual, spending my life in books and libraries without knowing what the hell is going on in the streets. Theory without practice is just as incomplete as practice without theory. The two have to go together.
Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.
We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector.
Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church is often labeled today as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.
Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.
To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.
The book borrower...proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures...as by his failure to read these books.
How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
I am unpacking my library. Yes I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order.
Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.